The Refugees

In little over two years, Viet Thanh Nguyen has emerged as a leading figure in the literary world, winning the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for his astounding crime / immigrant / Vietnam War thriller The Sympathizer and getting shortlisted for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Choice award in non-fiction for Nothing Ever Dies (which is an academic book intended to accompany The Sympathizer).

Nguyen has also been serving as the cultural critic at large for the Los Angeles Times, writing about literature and politics through a biting radical lens (which is refreshing when the literary world tends to be rather bland and liberal, even in these dark times of Trump).

For someone who has had his pulse on American cultural and political life, it is both fortuitous and fitting that Nguyen's new short story collection entitled The Refugees, dedicated to "all refugees,"is being released in the shadow of Trump's draconian ban on refugees from seven Muslim countries.

The Refugees is a collection of eight short stories, offering insights into various refugee experiences, mostly focused on the Vietnamese diaspora that emigrated from South East Asia in the years after the end of the American war in the region. Nguyen touches on themes of regret and loss, of trying to outrun the experiences and memories that turned one into a refugee, of the political cultures that transposed themselves from home country to new home, and the struggles that refugees experience in their new countries, both of survival and dealing with expectations from those they left behind.

As with The Sympathizer, Nguyen's writing drives the forcefulness of his stories. He writes thoughtful sentences that layer on top of each other to create both atmosphere and mood but also complexity, making the reader dig deep into the text to understand the motivations and actions of his characters. The stories he gives us are painful and somber, yet also with a touch of outlandish humour he pulled off so well in his previous novel.

As the current US Administration seeks to vilify the refugee populations that were products of American imperial adventures, Nguyen's collection is both powerful and necessary. We need to hear the painful pasts that have driven people to leave their homes and families, to understand and empathize with their experiences and appreciate the stakes they (and humanity) face if we ignore them and further marginalize them.

For this reason alone, I urge you all to pick up the book. It's a quick and easy read, yet will give you the energy to keep on struggling for the rights of refugees now and in the future.
**I received an advance copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

The Dark Side of Monkey Business: Kaitlyn Greenidge's We Love You, Charlie Freeman

I really had no idea what I was getting into when I saw that Greenidge's debut novel was a Kobo Daily Deal. I am trying to read as many of the Tournament of Book finalists this year, and Greenidge's work made the final 16 so I snatched it up. Although I had heard it pitched by Liberty Hardy on Book Riot's  All The Books Podcast, I had little idea of what the content actually was...and wow that is not what I expected.

SOME SPOILERS - WARNING - SOME SPOILERS

We Love You, Charlie Freeman is the story of the Freeman family, a Bostonian African American family whose matriarch is a trained sign language instructor hired by a prestigious institute committed to studying human-chimpanzee communication. The entire family, each of whom is fluent in sign, moves into the institute and live with an emotionally broken and vulnerable chimp named Charlie, whom the family embraces as one of their own.

Told through the eyes of each family member, with an additional flash-back narrator (Nymphadora) who worked with a doctor from the institute in its early years, Greenidge offers a close inspection of how this odd family dynamic slowly tears apart the tight-knit group. Mostly told through the gaze of the oldest daughter (Charlotte), we slowly learn that the institute had engaged in Tuskegee-like experiments in the 1920s, where racist scientists sought to compare African American and Chimpanzee bodily forms and communication abilities. Charlotte, disgusted by this past and by her mother's growing inappropriate intimacy with Charlie, tries to destabilize the circumstances she is trapped in, which results in the climactic blow-up and exposure of the dark past and present practices of the institute.

As a debut novel, Greenidge has offered us a really meaty treatment of a very odd plot. Heavy questions of racial prejudice in scientific research and institutional defenses for their past behaviours is confronted head on. Add to that the complex issues of family breakdown that results from a spouse's career ambition, we are left with a complex social and family drama that demands further discussion. This will be a great book for the Tournament of Books and I hope it makes it forward at least a round or two so we can be exposed to more intelligent discussion on the matter.

That said, there are issues that made this a less than perfect book (I ended up only giving it three stars on Goodreads). Significant plot developments involving the mother's growing emotional and physical attachment to Charlie or the youngest daughter's obsession with obtaining Charlie's acceptance seem to come to fruition without preparing the reader for them. It felt like Greenidge was asked to cut portions of the novel that would have filled in these gaps and efforts to close the gaps left the reader wondering "what the hell just happened." I am being purely speculative here, but first-time authors are probably under enormous pressure to accept the recommendation of their editors and editors are too quick to cut down the length of their books, even if the final product suffers as a result.

We Love You, Charlie Freeman, was an original and well told story and I those following the TOB should definitely pick it up as I believe it will lead to some of the best discussion. That said, I feel somewhat unsatisfied feeling that Greenidge did not quite achieve the potential this book could have offered.

#ReadDiverse2017